Make Windows System Restore work better for you

System Restore is an excellent Windows technology, one that’s saved our PCs many times -- but it’s not exactly flexible. You can restore an entire system point, or maybe a shadow copy or two (right-click a folder, select Properties > Previous Versions), but that’s about it.

So it’s good to see System Restore Explorer offering an alternative approach. Launch the program and it’ll display a list of restore points, but when you choose one of these it’ll be mounted and displayed in an Explorer window. So you can now manually browse through the restore point, and if you locate a file which you need, then retrieval is as easy as a drag and drop.

And as a bonus, you can even delete individual restore points, which can be handy if you’re looking to free up hard drive space as Windows Disk Cleanup normally only allows you to delete all but the most recent one.

If there’s a problem here it’s that System Restore Explorer has been in beta for a very long time, so presumably still has a few bugs lurking. It ran just fine on our test Windows 7 PC, but keep its beta status in mind if you intend to use the program for any system-critical purpose.

Photo Credit: Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock